Tag Archives: Self-Publishing

#ThenCameDarkness One Year Later

Then Came Darkness Front Cover

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year since I released my historical thriller, Then Came Darkness. I dove back into self-publishing not only because I thought this was a novel worth sharing with others, but also because I desired to test the waters again, a long twelve years after the release of my last novel, The Thief Maker. I had nothing to lose thanks to the democratization of self-publishing—literally anyone can do it now…for free…through Amazon KDP, which is both a blessing and curse.

Overall I’ve been pleased with the reception. One always hopes for more (more reviews, more sales), but I can’t complain when some readers and reviewers clearly “get it” and the audience organically grows little by little.

Here are some of my favorite reviewer quotes from the first year:

  • “The catharsis of emotional writing in this book was incredible…I laughed. I cried. I had to take breaks because some scenes tore me to pieces. It’s dark, gritty, and I love it.” – Lo Potter Writes
  • “A page-turner with a dark slant, morally gray characters who were flawed yet likable, realistic and multi-faceted with certain twists I didn’t see coming.” – Jenna Moquin, author 
  • “Tense and brooding…like (The) Grapes of Wrath, only creepier and with a lot more murder…a delightfully dark read.” – Margaret Adelle, booktuber
  • “Historical fiction at its finest. D. H. Schleicher is a master with words…I found myself holding my breath several times.” – Gina Rae Mitchell, book blogger
  • “Gritty, Real, Fiction…Schleicher thrusts readers deep into the early part of the twentieth century, with real people living real lives and experiencing a thrilling, suspenseful tale….the rising conflict and relationships between characters reminded me of one of the classics I read in high school, but this time, I was reading it for pleasure!” – C. D. Tavenor, author and co-founder of Two Doctors Media

In the hopes this might help others considering self-publishing, here are some lessons I learned over the course of this year.

  1. ARC’s are Our Friends – When I release my short story collection next year, I want to send out Advanced Review Copies prior to the soft-launch. The first reviews are always hard to come by, and it took me awhile to find the right audience and support for Then Came Darkness. Doing the leg-work in advance and finding a select group of book bloggers and fellow writers already familiar with or open to my work to send ARC’s will hopefully get the buzz building quicker next time.
  2. The #WritingCommunity is Great, But is There an Echo in Here? In Here? – The #WritingCommunity on Twitter is what you make of it, and it can be wonderful. Through this ever-expanding community on Twitter, I found my “people”—the book bloggers and fellow writers who wanted to read my work and who were genuinely supportive. I also discovered some great indie writers whose work I immensely enjoyed and I would not have found otherwise. But be warned, it can be overwhelming at first, and yes, a large portion of the community is locked into a bizarre “let’s get the biggest number of followers and retweets we can” mentality that leads to a very loud echo chamber. Be selective and strategic and look for those genuine connections—the good people are out there. It was also hard for me as most writers were pushing genres I don’t write or typically read: romance, erotica, sci-fi, fantasy, YA. But I eventually found those doing literary fiction, historical fiction, thrillers, suspense, and noir. You can also find a bevy of professional service providers (book cover designers, editors, etc…) and indie literary magazines (I found a home for three short stories), but just be careful and do your research to make sure they are legit.
  3. I’d Never Join a Club that Would Have Me as a Member! – If you join the #WritingCommunity, you’ll likely find all kinds of #IndieAuthor groups and networks who (some for free, and some for a small membership fee) will make you an author page on their site and blast tweets of your work to thousands of followers. While most of these are well-intentioned and are truly trying to provide a book promotion service to indie authors, the majority of their followers seem to be other indie authors…not readers…and thus its becomes a social media screaming match where books are constantly on blast to a bottomless echo chamber. There is also no filtering of the good stuff vs. the bad stuff and very little audience segmentation. It’s a maddening free-for-all. For me, I found these quickly to be a waste of energy (and sometimes…money). 
  4. It’s a Racket, I Tellz Ya! – Contests are a numbers games you likely can’t win. With The Thief Maker I had some luck with contests, garnering honorable mentions in a few. I thought I could rinse and repeat with Then Came Darkness, and though I was able to score an Official Selection in the Suspense/Thriller category for the 2019 New Apple Summer E-book Awards, a lot has changed in twelve years and there are more contests and more independent and self-published writers entering them than ever before. Most have some kind of entry fee, and some pay handsome cash awards and/or provide free marketing. There are others out there in the community far more well-versed than I am about which ones are legit and which are scams. All I know is the odds of winning, even if you have a great book on your hands and the contest is legit, are slim. It’s a simple numbers game, and the odds are not in your favor. I’m likely not going to waste my time or money on contests the next go around. It would be better spent on very targeted marketing.
  5. Treat Your Neighbors Well – If you know what you are doing, some controllable spending on very targeted digital marketing (FB ads, Amazon ads, targeted e-mail lists) can work if you keep realistic goals (we’re talking small incremental sales, folks)…but the best way to build buzz and find readers is to pound the pavements. For me, this was the digital pavements of social media (through real engagement and not just “buy link” blasts, which are okay if solicited), and the physical pavements of my neighborhood which is blessed with a plethora of #LittleFreeLibraries. I’ve dropped many personalized signed copies into these neighborhood nooks of knowledge and entertainment, and many I have had to restock. The one at the end of my street has been restocked half a dozen times. Which means when my family and I stroll downtown or around the neighborhood, there could be a passerby who has read my book, enjoyed it, and I would never know it. And that’s the greatest feeling in the world for a writer.

Buy the paperback from Amazon.com for $11.99.

Download a copy to your Kindle for $4.99, or always free with Kindle Unlimited.

Ask your local indie bookstore to stock their shelves through Indiebound.

Keep up with all the latests news, read excerpts, and get a behind the scenes glimpse of what inspired me to write it at the official website:

ThenCameDarkness.Com

Written by D. H. Schleicher

Before the Darkness: Thoughts on Earlier Writing

Don’t ever let them tell you life is short, Ty. Life is long and people do lots of things. Some of them good. Some of them bad. And sometimes these things catch up to people. And sometimes that takes a long time.  – Evelyn Kydd, from Then Came Darkness

The arc of a writer’s life is long, too. You have to write a lot of bad stuff (and read a lot of good stuff) before you learn how to write well.

I’ve been writing since I was seven years-old (my first story was a melodrama about a jewel heist) and I’ve shoveled my fair share of crap, including countless twisted tales during middle and high school, and three highly questionable and amateur novels I rushed to market during the infancy of the self-publishing craze right after college before I finally wrote some good stuff, The Thief Maker. I’d like to think my latest, Then Came Darkness, is good stuff, too. It laid dormant for a number of years as my favorite unpublished work, and then on a delirious whim fueled by exhaustion and inspiration while on parental leave last year, I thought to myself, “What the heck, let’s dust this off and publish this thing!” It was equal parts a lark, and a test of the new waters.

A lot has changed in the twelve years since I self-published my first bit of good stuff, The Thief Maker. In the years between that and Then Came Darkness I’ve been busy with blogging and short stories (some which have been published), and big life stuff like advancing in my corporate career, multiple trips to Europe, getting married, buying a house, and having a baby. It’s easier now than ever before to self-publish thanks in large part to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program, but it’s probably ten times as hard to find an audience as it was twelve years ago (not that I was very successful then either, though the small audience I did find for The Thief Maker seemed to like it).

I was honestly lost this time around until I found the #WritingCommunity on Twitter and started making use of my neighborhood Little Free Libraries, which I have tirelessly stocked with autographed copies. The one at the end of my street has been restocked at least five times…so thanks, neighbors, or whoever you are out there reading Then Came Darkness!

The early reviews from fellow indie authors, book bloggers, and readers have been slow to come, but mostly positive. People seem to love the characters (which brings up a feeling of pride second only to having my actual child praised by strangers), and my favorite blurb thus far has come from C. D. Tavenor, who stated “the rising conflict and relationships between characters reminded me of one of the classics I read in high school, but this time, I was reading it for pleasure!” He also loved the cover designed by my wife (thanks, hun!)

All of this made me want to take a little trip up to my attic full of boxes which store much of my earlier writing, which as terrible as most of it is, was fun as hell as to write at the time. I fondly remember the days of middle school friends fighting over who got a character named after them, and furious scribblings in notebooks during torturously boring high school classes that got passed around like gossip. Many of the techniques used, character types birthed, and themes explored later were present there from the start: fractured non-linear timelines, unreliable narrators, feisty women, tortured men, and resourceful orphans all trying to survive personal tragedies amidst larger chaotic (often apocalyptic) events.

So here, for fun, are some delicious tidbits from all that crap I had to write then to get to where I am now. Continue reading →

Summer Reading for 2009

Wondering what to read this summer?  Well here’s a motley lot of books that have found their way from the shelves to my coffee table with the potential to satisfy your desire for trashy (and gory) beach reads as well as your need for some substance and perspective.

JUST FINISHED:

Hater by David Moody.  28 Days Later meets Fight Club meets The Road in this bloody mess of a debut from Brit David Moody.  The novel is of special interest for self-published writers as Moody originally published the novel on the internet before selling the movie rights to horror film producer Guillermo Del Toro and subsequently landing a major publishing contract.  I have to hand it to Moody.  He’s ambitious, and his success is the type all writers dream of.  That being said, Hater isn’t terribly well written.  The first person narration is clunky and repetitive, the characters shallow and poorly drawn and even I know better than to write entire chapters in italics.  However, the premise is interesting enough and taps into some timely discussions on the culture of fear and paranoia that permeates much of our culture.  It’s easy to see why Del Toro thought this could be good fodder for a film, and with Juan Antonio Bayona (of El Orfanato fame) on board to direct, the movie actually seems promising if they take a more psychological approach to the mayhem than the book did.  We’ll have to wait and see, meanwhile, the second part of this alleged trilogy should be hitting bookshelves soon.

CURRENTLY READING:

The Best American Short Stories – 2008 edition, edited by Salman Rushdie.  If you’re like me and don’t have the time to scour through literary magazines for your short-story fix, you can sample the best of the best with this yearly compilation.  I’m maybe half a dozen stories in, and so far my favorite is Danielle Evans’ humorous and quietly heartbreaking tale of why young girls do the foolish things they do, “Virgins”, which originally appeared in The Paris Review.  Evans’ story is the type of sharply observed “slice-of-life” piece that makes fellow scribes wonder what the hell they have been wasting their time writing about for the past year.  Seriously, what the hell have I been writing?

Loser Takes All  by Graham Greene.  No list of mine can exist without an entry from Greene.  One wonders why I didn’t take to this gambling-themed novel sooner.  Just looking at the roulette wheel on the cover makes me want to hop in the car and hit the expressway to Atlantic City.  Alas, this is one of Greene’s breeziest and slightest works, but, it’s still Greene, my friends.  With him I never lose.

IN THE QUEUE:

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.  Yes, I know, I’m a few years behind the times on this one, and heck, I should’ve dived into this one a long time ago with my love of circuses and Depression Era stories.  Didn’t everyone read this in the summer of 2007?   Better late than never, I say.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  Yes, I know, I’m waaaaaaay behind the times on this one, but no summer is complete without the tackling of at least one “big thick novel”.  I’m a huge fan of the John Ford 1940 film version, so I’m really looking forward to this Depression Era classic.

Written by David H. Schleicher

________________________________________________________________________________________

So what’s on your reading list this summer?  Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comment form! 

Happy reading!

Novelist Rebecca Lerwill on Independent Publishing

The following is the 1st in my new Guest Blogger Series.

Introduction from David H. Schleicher:

Independent filmmakers who finance their own projects are often praised as innovative, creative, and edgy and seem to get instant street-cred when they buck the studio system.  Independent filmmaking has long been celebrated, and virtually no one would question the rite of a filmmaker taking the indie route.  Sadly, the moniker of independent novelist doesn’t carry the same goodwill and those who finance their own writing projects outside the system are often regarded as not credible, second-rate and find it nearly impossible to compete with the traditional publishing houses.  Yet one can still find success in self-publishing and Rebecca Lerwill, a purveyor of romantic suspense novels, is one such author who has brushed off the stigma of being an indie author with style and class.

Having shared my own experiences as an independent novelist on my blog in the past (in The Verdict on Self-Publishing and My Trials and Tribulations with Self-Publishing), I thought fellow writers and bloggers might be interested in someone else’s views on independent publishing – someone who writes stories vastly different from my own and who has taken some different approaches to publishing and promotion but nevertheless has words of wisdom, advice and tips for writers from any walk of life.  Therefore I asked Rebecca Lerwill to be my first ever guest blogger and invited her to share her experiences as an indie author. 

___________________________________________

Here’s what Rebecca Lerwill had to say:

Dave – thank you so much for inviting me to be a guest on your blog. As a subscriber of your blog page, I always look forward to your honest book and film reviews and goofy drinking games. The latter are a welcomed break from the dry and dreary business of book promotion which is mostly done during lonely hours online.You sent me a few questions regarding my books, my publisher, and what I do to promote. Before I get into those questions, please let me introduce myself to your readers.

I was born and raised in Germany and moved to the United States in 1996. As a horse trainer by trade, I lived in Michigan and California. After meeting my husband Troy, a professional rodeo clown and entertainer, I spent a few years ‘on the road’ as his traveling partner. Those long hours eating blacktop gave me the opportunity to read case loads of books, and after finishing my all-time favorite, Julie Garwood’s Killjoy, I was so intrigued by the story’s plot that I decided to become an author myself. That’s right; the most-asked question, “Did you always wanted to be a writer?” gets a shake of the head for an answer.

I’ve always been an avid reader but besides a few halfway decent essays in school I never thought about being a writer — until the summer of 2006. Fifteen months later my debut in romantic suspense, Relocating Mia, was honored with its first award; Finalist in the Indie Excellence Book Awards. The sequel to Relocating Mia, The Acronym, was published in April 2009 and has received very promising reviews. Continue reading →